Community Tours Spark Interest in Pilsen
Patrick Barry
Published: July 17, 2009
Attracting tourists is one of the oldest money-making schemes in the world, but urban neighborhoods haven't often invested the resources to attract visitors and then roll out the red carpet when they arrive. But that's changing.
Alejandro Morales-Aponte explains about Pilsen's historic vaulted sidewalks during a tour of the community in May.
Pilsen has the history, culture, arts, restaurants, and architecture to attract visitors from across the city and the country. Close to downtown, with readily available public transportation, the neighborhood is a natural for tourists who want to experience Chicago outside of the Loop. The big need is to make it easy for visitors to discover and experience Pilsen. One way to meet that need is through community tours.
"The time has come for us to toot our own horn, to tell people that we have a lot to offer," said Álvaro Obregón, the New Communities program director at The Resurrection Project, at a panel discussion in March. He and about 20 participants had just finished a bus tour of Pilsen, part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Main Street Conference in Chicago.
Obregón thinks there is plenty more opportunity for visitors to spend money at restaurants, bakeries and other stores while they are visiting Pilsen. The Main Street tour, led by Kristy Menas and Hector Saldaña of the community’s Eighteenth Street Development Corporation, was an excellent example of how a tour can bring visitors into the community—and hopefully bring them back.
Menas and Saldaña used the tour to interweave historic information about 120-year-old houses and vaulted sidewalks with more-current stories about new businesses going in (an Italian restaurant at Thalia Hall) and events like the Mole de Mayo cook-off.
The mix of Pilsen’s history, architecture, and today’s vibrant community was also at the center of “Discover Pilsen: Healthy, Vibrant and Organized,” a tour of the neighborhood in May as one of six community tours celebrating the Burnham Plan Centennial.
Lead by Alejandro Morales-Aponte of the Resurrection Project, the “Bold Plans, Big Dreams Community Showcase” tour emphasized the history of community organizing and development in Pilsen, showing a busload of tourists how social activism has built the community and continues to be a force for a bright future. Plans are underway to continue to provide the tour, which was created in conjunction with experts in Chicago and Pilsen history and architecture.
“Pilsen’s rich story touches on many aspects of American experience; its buildings telling us about the history of labor, of immigrant rights, of the birth of social services and much more before the turn of the century, stuff that history books are made of,” Morales-Aponte says. “The Burnham Centennial Pilsen tour the opens the box into the history that is in the making, Pilsen and its dynamic community-based organizations, its progress, and successes—stuff that history books should be made of.”
This article is based on items previously published on Community Beat, a group blog about neighborhood development in Chicago.
Posted in Community Events
